Avoid this STUPID MISTAKE when Scoring Doughs

Intro gluten talk in this video i want to show you how a small stupid mistake when scoring a bread dough can make all the difference between poor and massive oven spring interestingly who would have guessed that ultimately baguettes would give me the final clue to what i was doing wrong it turned out that this mistake isn't that obvious and many resources online give you the wrong information anyways i will show you how to avoid this and after watching this video you will have a much better understanding of bread making what scoring Why score? scarring is the part where you give your bread though a small incision before the bake if you do everything right you will get nice oven spring you will have a beautiful ear on your bread though this year is the holy grail of bread making the ear just shows that you have nailed every single piece of the whole process the ear is a little bit smaller it becomes darker and more crisp while baking when then eating a slice you will have all the different colors each color of your crust gives you a different taste if you have that ear you never want to go back it's just flavor explosion in your mouth the problem with scoring is that it happens at the end of the process and you only have one chance to get it right you can't rescore a dough this means you have to nail it to score your bread you can use a knife make sure that it's a very very sharp knife there are also specialized tools such as alarm lame i think alarm is the proper name but probably the best way is to simply get yourself a razor blade you can get yourself a fancy handle for your razor blade so this is one of the fancy tools for instance and all you do is you put your razor blade right inside but i really think the best tool that you can use is just a plain razor blade be careful though because it's relatively sharp now i've been baking bread for a few years but occasionally sometimes i wouldn't get that off in spring and for a baker that's a very very sad moment if you've been there you know what i'm talking about you spend so much time making the perfect dough and then your bread just turns out flat it's really sad now poor oven spring can be due to a variety of reasons too much water for your flour you ferment it too short you ferment it too long you bake too hot you baked too cold you didn't have enough steam there are so many issues in fact around one year ago i made a video where i showed you how around 20 degrees in difference can be all the difference between massive oven spring and poor oven spring just by lowering the temperature a bit for me i started to get much better bread anyways the scoring part isn't so easy and i think it's a major factor that you need to get right and shame on me after re-watching my old master class on sourdough bread even i i'm not explaining it properly but hopefully this time we're gonna get it right the problem became really apparent when i was trying to make baguettes baguettes are not too easy because you have to practice the shaping technique and loading them inside of the oven is a little bit of a pain now if you figure that out you still have to score them and i personally think this is the most challenging part when making baguettes the perfect baguettes should open up really nicely in the oven and have several beautiful ears then you have a soft fluffy crumb paired with that slight crispness it's perfect unfortunately though mine didn't open up and this is where it gets really interesting the engineer in me wanted to debug this and to begin i thought okay it might be the fermentation the fermentation is typically where most beginners make mistakes fermentation times always change depending on your ambient temperature if you just feed your sourdoughs that are slightly different if you use more or less yeast it's crazy to simplify everything i resorted to drastic measures and started to use just plain yeast sourdough is a little bit more complicated okay actually a little a lot more complicated but then after a few attempts i still couldn't get my baguettes to open up properly what was i doing wrong it either had to be a steam issue a temperature issue or maybe a scoring issue now my friend sebastian lives in ghana hi he's also one of the pandemic bakers and he's really making excellent baguettes and just the other day he sent me a picture and his baguettes opened up so Baguette scoring much more than my baguettes did still they didn't have that perfect ear yet if you don't mind the ear i think they open up 10 times better than mine did so what was i doing wrong now the video that sebastian used is patrick ryan's baguette master class and it's a really excellent video that i recommend you to check out let's have a look at the video real quick patrick is such a good instructor for making red i could watch his videos for hours and this one is just on making the perfect baguette you can't think of french bread or arkansas breads without taking off baguettes so true so we're going to show you how easy it is to make so now this recipe is a little bit different it does take he's making excellent baguettes but now let's fast forward please do check out the full video here i think first of all this i just want to show you quickly from here this to me has always been so hard loading the baguettes into the oven what i recommend you to do is just get a little bit of cardboard and that's just going to make everything so simple because at the end your dough is very very extensible and it just becomes a gigantic sausage well we germans love sausages but it's nothing you want for making baguettes and now let's check out the scoring the oven is we need to score them again a lot of people when there's fancy scoring knife here when you're kind of scoring begets because of the way it looks as it's finished the tendency is cut straight across the dough what we're looking for is almost straight lines each one just offsets the next it's going to look like an ear of wheat and then the next one starts just behind basically aim to do a straight line because you won't do it so he's cutting at almost no angle at all and let me show you what happens in the end with the baguettes lovely light beautiful crisp they open up a little bit but you don't have that pronounced ear on the baguettes beautiful crisp lovely rustic baguettes and you can actually actually hear them sing just as you come out of the oven you hear no crack you're in a break when you get that that you can listen to your bread afterwards when taking it out of the oven it's so satisfying so yeah definitely a great video by patrick ryan please do check that out i'm going to be linking it in the description i think the baguettes look really nice but still i think that ear could be slightly improved maybe i'm a big perfectionist but i really wanted to get that here i wanted my bread to massively spring in the oven well my baguettes are baguettes bread so let's dive into that just a little bit deeper because this is a really really really good lesson and it's so not obvious scoring baguettes to me is really the hardest part your dough isn't cold it's at room temperature and scoring a dough at room temperature is quite hard you're gonna tear that dough so i researched more and i found two additional great videos the first one is a classical video just focusing on baguette scoring this video here is so awesome it's a video for around three minutes just focusing on how you should score the perfect baguette hi welcome back to the bread lab today we're gonna be hi mac showing you some techniques for scoring baguettes did you just say the bread lab that sounds like exactly the place where i want to work at so then what mag does is mac is marking the baguettes with different lines and he shows you in the end how the baguettes open up depending on how you scored them i think it's a super eye-opening video and let's check how mac here is scoring them for expansion at this point all the way down across the bread okay that leaves no room for expansion at these points as well by cutting straight essentially straight down that bread that's breaking it in right down the middle allowing it to expand so i was trying the technique that mac has shown me but unfortunately it became a little bit better but still not in a way that i was super happy with the final baguettes that i was making regardless i think it's a super useful video that i'm going to be linking in the description of the video okay a swift movement with the hand holding your hand a little bit at an angle i tried that but i couldn't really get it to work maybe i just need to practice on a few more thousand baguettes now i'm just a home baker so for me that's really hard but then i saw another video which would give me the final clue it's a video by carl and the sourdough library let's have a look at it and then it finally made click seriously this video that i'm about to show you has been so eye-opening for me so let's check this out that's all that's my song he's one of our bakers and he's from france so that's all i invite the song knows his duff i can guarantee you that two to slice the rest of the baguettes to make them perfect yes please you hold the knife like this not like that okay okay wow it goes smooth like butter we have now the six baguettes two with seven cups two with five show me the baguettes please there we are voila so this is exactly the kind of baguette that i want to be making at some point this is perfect the difference between seven five that you draw on the baguette make sure that you overlap one third the cuts that you have to cut uneven three five or seven depending on the length of the baguette and as vasa told us it's very important okay listen to this The angle when scoring a dough now important to keep your knife as horizontal as possible so that you get underneath the surface of the baguette so that the shred can break open and not just spread open so do not cut like this make sure the blade is very sharp so and i think this to me has been the biggest game-changing tip super cool video i'm going to be linking it in the description as well thank you so much carl and this song of course the most important tip is you have to flay your dough at a horizontal angle at a horizontal angle really let's have a look at my original sardo master class what was i saying now we have to be a little bit quick i'm doing that 45 degrees incision because i want to have a nice ear in the end i was saying you have to score at around a 45 degree angle now horizontal does not equal 45 degrees if my math is correct and all the other sources you find on the interwebs typically suggest you to score at a 45 degree angle and that's always what i've been doing but it turned out that this is wrong well it's not wrong but it's also not fully true either so was i really scoring at a 45 degree angle nope i was not it turns out i was actually scoring at a 90 degree angle and you wouldn't believe how stupid i was it's kind of really obvious now that i think about it now if you're scoring your breath though at the center directly in the middle then scoring at a 45 degree angle is kind of obvious okay i'm really bad at making angles but this sort of is the angle that you want but then again most recipes don't call for scoring directly in the center they call for scoring slightly off one centimeter to the right which i guess is half an inch now at one centimeter to the right a 45 degree angle is no longer a 45 degree angle let's quickly head to my white board i need to visualize this for you and that's gonna become obvious so the important thing here to learn is how you score this is a 90 degree angle and this is a 45 degree angle and everybody will always tell you to score at a 45 degree angle now your breath though is probably looking like this so if you're scoring here then your angle is going to be 90 degrees from the top it looks like 45 degrees though so in that case you really have to go a lot further down this would be a 45 degree angle the way you have to score it here so your razor blade would almost be horizontal to the dough and this is a really really important lesson so at one centimeter off to the right i'm not scoring any more at a 45 degree angle i'm more scoring at a 90 degree angle that's because your dough is round in this case you almost have to hold your razor blade horizontal just like what carl said flay at a horizontal angle [Music] and yeah that worked out beautifully i scored the dose at around half a centimeter in depth as far as i can tell the more puffy your dough is the less deep you want to score it if you have a relatively stiff dough you want to score it a little bit deeper at a stiff though i would be scoring for around one centimeter deep with a more puffy highly hydrated dough not as deep just half a centimeter that's gonna make a little bit of a difference in terms of how much your bread is gonna open up to the sides but scoring at an angle that's gonna make all the difference then i reverted back to my baguettes and suddenly i started to see a little bit of an ear it's still not perfect yet but i think i'm getting there [Music] awesome and slightly crazy right just by adjusting the angle at which you're scoring your dough you will get more oven spring and you will finally get that ear to pop seriously i wish all of this was written down somewhere with explanation so i wouldn't have to debug this on my own another Practicing scoring really good closing tip that i want to give you is that after mixing the ingredients make a nice round smooth dough ball and just start scoring that dough ball like crazy you can test a lot pay close attention to what a 45 and what a 90 degree angle is practice this it's at room temperature so it's even harder to me this helped a lot to get better at scoring do you have additional comments on scoring please drop them in the comment section and show me some loaf love actually not loaf but you know i'm a baker so loaf if you're not on our discord server yet please make sure to join it's an awesome community of like-minded bakers and it's completely free i'm gonna be sharing the link in the description of the video thank you very much bye [Music] why am i always making those stupid jokes that nobody finds funny i'm strange